Magda Buczek, a current resident at VAA Nida Art Colony, invites you to her studio (E. A. Jonušo Str. 3, Neringa) on the 14th of September at 7PM. The artist will present a performance titled “In the pines, in the pines”.

In the pines, in the pines

performance by Magda Buczek feat. Maria Kozłowska

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The Polish artist Magda Buczek, together with curator Aneta Rostkowska, investigates the relation between human and plants. How do we interfere with the silent world of flora? After all, the soil that the plants emerge from is the substance of our past – metaphorically and physically it belongs to our ancestors. Can we communicate on the verge of these worlds? The artist traces these issues with experimental light, saturation and inversion in photography, and performative research in the field of language. The outcome of this long-term project will be an artbook which the artist has described as “white trash cyber punk gothic romance”. “What I wanted to produce was a gothic romance, then it turned into cyberpunk gothic, curving into white trash cyber punk gothic romance for now,” Magda claims.

In her practice, visual media like photography, drawing and video overlap with text, performance and found footage. The outcome is a multichannel collage of pop culture mythologies, adolescent initiation rituals, and narratives in between online and offline realities. Recurring themes are body versus persona and notions of presence in post-Internet performative practices. Her projects are time-based, long-term and often involve volunteers.

During the first open studios Magda presented an experimental approach to the photographic medium, drawings and photo collages with the use of colour inversion and saturation. This time the artist invites us to enter the primordial territory and get lost in the woods in search of presence – ours, hers and of the unnamed. The two-month residency at VAA Nida Art Colony is an incubation phase for the artist, which she has spent doing performative research.

Magda Buczek studied at the Academy of Fine Arts and JagiellonianUniversity in Krakow and the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp. She received the Young Talent Prize and the Audience Prize at Foto festival Łódź 2009 and the Polish Photobook of the Year in self publishing in 2014. Buczek was shortlisted for the MACK First Book Award in London. She was an artist in residence in SOMA Mexico, U.S. and Iceland. Exhibited works in Berlin (Kunstlerhaus Bethanien), New York (WANTED Design Festival), Mexico city (SOMA), Athens (BenakiMuseum) and at Baltic Biennale (Krakow, Bunkier Sztuki). Lives and works in Warsaw.